Parks Chief Tired Of Dumped Tires

Hartford — After noticing 72 reports of illegal tire dumping around town in just six months, Rebecca Bombero decided to head to the state legislature to seek some help.

Bombero, director of the city’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees, testified in Hartford last week in favor of HB 6352, a bill establishing a ​“tire stewardship” program in Connecticut.

Illegal dumped tires create pollution along roads, rivers and waterways, and parks as well as creating breeding environments for mosquitoes.

The bill, proposed by Hartford State Reps. Douglas McCrory and Matt Ritter of Hartford, would set up a program in which tire companies (manufacturers and distributors) would be responsible for safe disposal of tires in Connecticut and managing scrap tire use, promoting recycling over dumping. Municipalities like New Haven are currently on the hook for costs for cleaning up dumped tires.

The tire industry would assume a plan to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) for managing their product through the disposal stage.

About 3.41 million tires become unusable ​“waste tires” each year across the state, according to DEEP and the Scrap Tire Management Council. Those that are not incinerated as fuel in Maine’s old paper mills (the tire-to-energy facility in the state, where they were also burned, closed in 2013) may end up reported on the SeeClickFix citizen problem-reporting website as dumped.

Bombero said department employees lose a day of work each time tires are dumped within city limits. After noting 72 reports of illegal tire dumping on SeeClickFix in a mere six months, she urged the committee to pass the bill.

“In terms of the tire stewardship bill, I want to go over a couple of numbers,” she told legislators at a hearing this past Wednesday held by the legislature’s Environment Committee. ​“Within the last six months in New Haven, we’ve had over 70 instances of dumping tires — often in ravines, our waterways, and areas that are hard to access and clean up. Some of these instances, we see in an excess of over 30 tires at a time. So it has an environmental impact, but it also has a fiscal impact because we need to use valuable staff resources to clean up these sites.”

“I truly believe it’s businesses that are dumping that number of tires at the same time,” she said later.

She referenced the success of a law that established mattress stewardship, disposal, and recycling regulations across the state in 2013.

Bombero had a number of allies at the Environment Committee hearing. DEEP Commissioner Robert Klee voiced his support for the bill, noting that illegal dumping of tires 2014 cost the state $16,000 over nine months. 

The bill is an ​“effective way to increase the recovery of discarded tires and create jobs while virtually eliminating the illegal dumping of tires,” he testified. ​“Illegally dumped tires provide an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes as well as present a fire hazard.”

Donna Hamzy of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) echoed that statement — and expressed concern that too much cost for illegally dumped tires falls to municipalities, not to the manufacturers and distributors of tires.

“It is estimated that in Connecticut more than 3.4 million tires become scrap every year,” she said. ​“Many of these tires are illegally dumped in towns and cities, polluting the environment, producing blight and forcing municipalities to shoulder the cost of collecting, transporting and disposing of these tires. The bill … would take the financial and administrative burden of end-of-life disposal for these items off the back of local governments. This is a no-cost proposal for the state and could result in significant statewide savings for municipalities.”

Alicea Charamut of the Connecticut River Watershed Council stated that volunteers pull an average of 700 tires from the river each year.

Dan Zielinski of the Rubber Manufacturers Association testified in opposition to the bill, suggesting that ​“reworking a working system now is not the solution.”

Instead of instituting an ​“entirely new” stewardship program, he suggested, business owners and manufacturers could establish new guidelines, like exploring more environmentally solvent options for scrap tires and issuing an individual registration number on each tire.

“There’s really limited reuse of scrap materials into new material,” he argued in defense of burning tires for fuel instead of recycling them. ​“And it’s good for the environment.”

“Really, it’s good for the environment? That’s news to me,” said committee Co-Chair State Sen. Ted Kennedy, Jr. Zielinski insisted that carbon emissions released in controlled tire burning operations fall within Environmental Protection Agency standards. 

Dan Rubino, counsel to Town Fair Tire Centers, Inc. in East Haven, also came out against the proposed bill. 

“The proposed program included in Bill 6352 will dismantle the current system and reverse of the progress and the advances made in the tire collection and disposal industry. It would mandate and force a new, unwieldy, burdensome, costly, and unlimited bureaucracy in place of an established, efficient and proven tire waste management system that currently exists in Connecticut. And, it would do so without addressing the primary issue that faces the industry.

“Among other known negative consequences of such a program, tire costs will increase to fund the new system; funding requirements and expense (in the form of fees, levies or taxes) will ultimately be borne by the consumer and residents of Connecticut; and scrap tires from other states will find their way into Connecticut, creating an additional problem that does not exist today.”

Bombero said that without a stewardship program, New Haven will have to continue to taking care of dumping, she said — and her financially strapped department doesn’t have the staff time to spare.

“In terms of us, the cost that is being borne by the municipality and therefore taxpayers is quite onerous,” she said. ​“For responsible businesses that are doing the right thing, I don’t see it as a penalty. For us, sometimes it takes a day and all of our rangers to remove tires from the slope of East Rock Park or Springside Avenue. They’re been working their butts off.”

Following is a status report on bills of particular interest to New Haven before the state legislature this session:

The 2017 Agenda